"Discover for yourself." He took her hands and brought them to his face.
Alex couldn't resist palpating the tissues to feel the bone beneath. "Nice. Solid. Any problems?"
"Some numbness in the bones, at first." His breath warmed her palms as he spoke. "It went away."
"Good." She touched a spot on the side of his face. "This hinge right here, this was a disaster. Thought I'd never…"
She was touching him. Chatting with him. Feeling proud of herself for the work she'd done, for the perfection of the results. When the only reason Michael Cyprien had a new face was because she'd been kidnapped and forced to make it for him.
Remember how he paid the tab, Alex.
She dropped her hands and stepped back, suddenly more tired than she had felt since this whole nightmare began.
"Alexandra, I never meant to curse… to infect you. You must believe that."
"Yeah." He had done what he'd had to do, and what he'd done to her had probably been, as he'd said, an accident. Which made it all the more pathetic. "Look, can't you just go away, leave me alone? I don't want to do this."
Cyprien took her hands in his again, but this time he simply held them. "I will not compel you to come to New Orleans, but I can offer you something in return. If you will help me, I will find the men who attacked your burn patient in Chicago."
Alex had kept tabs on Luisa Lopez through Sophia's attorney. He last reported her condition was improving, and her new doctor was arranging corneal transplants. The police intended to show her mug shots as soon as her vision was restored, but Luisa's mental state was such that they weren't sure she could make an ID or would be coherent enough to testify in court.
"I can find them myself." Guilt swamped Alex—she hadn't tried all that hard—but she could make that her next focal project. And how had Cyprien found out about Luisa? Why would he bother?
"Your resources are limited; mine are not." Cyprien tugged her closer. "Come to La Fontaine, and I will deliver these men into your hands."
He had her. He had her and he knew it, the son of a bitch. Alex jerked out of his grip. "What do you want this time?"
"Come with me." He gestured toward the street. "I will tell you everything."
Half a world away, in the bowels of La Lucemaria, novitiate John Keller emerged from the cubiculum where he had been sealed in for eight hours without food or light. His watch and personal possessions had been confiscated his first day of training, and he could no longer tell if it was dawn, noon, or midnight.
Waiting for him was his novitiate master, Brother Ettore Orsini.
"Ah, Brother Keller." Orsini allowed him a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light of the oil lamps that illuminated the gallery. "Did you have a restful night?"
John glanced back at the cubiculum, which was one of the smaller family tombs of La Lucemaria. The twenty loculi niches in its walls had all been stuffed with corpses on top of bones of other corpses, so he had slept on a mound of rotted linen in the center of the floor. It had felt like curling up on a cold stone postage stamp, but it was not the worst place he had slept in since beginning his training. On one memorable occasion, he had been forced to sleep in one of the stone sarcophagi, on top of a dusty corpse. With the lid on.
Part of his training was the rule of silence; John was not permitted to speak except to recite his daily paternosters, and those he murmured in a whisper. To answer a direct question, he either nodded or shook his head.
John nodded.
Orsini's thin lips stretched into the peculiar grimace that passed as a sneer or a smile; John had never been sure which. "Do you wish to stop the training?" He asked John that question before every session.
John couldn't move naturally anymore. Strained muscles, lacerations, and aching bones made pain his constant companion. A mass of scabs covered the soles of his feet; he was not allowed to wear shoes and some of the stone floors had unexpected sharp edges.
Sometimes he forgot the pain while praying. Orsini required him to recite 148 paternosters each day, with John counting off the number said at the end of each prayer.
"Fourteen paternosters each hour," the novitiate master instructed, "and eighteen for the glory of God at vespers. Then thirty when you wake each morning for the living, and thirty before you sleep for the dead."
Hunger gnawed at John as constantly as the pain. The food he was given to eat had been gradually reduced over time; he was now subsisting on a single slice of bread and a small cup of water each day. He knew the day ahead would push him to the limits of his endurance, and he wanted nothing more than to make it stop.
Orsini, ever vigilant for any sign of weakness, stepped closer. His voice took on a soft, understanding tone. "You have come far, Brother Keller, but you are tired, and hurt. No one will castigate you for giving up and choosing the path of the helot." He waited a few moments. "Your answer, Brother?"John slowly shook his head.
Cardinal Stoss had warned John that if at any time during his training he balked or disobeyed the novitiate master, he would spend the rest of his days within the order as a "helot," one of the monks who had failed training and subsequently served the other Brethren by cooking, laundering, and cleaning for them.
"Bene." The monk turned and walked off, leaving John to hobble stiffly after him.
Had he earned a meal this morning? John never knew when he would be fed. In the beginning the thin porridge and overboiled vegetables they had offered him had disgusted him; now he dreamed about them as he chewed the rough black bread that was his only food. He had survived starvation as a child by stealing; here there was nothing for him to take. The only other nourishment he received was the sip of wine and the host wafer during the mass he attended every seventh day. Any mention or thought of food made saliva pool in his mouth, and by the third mass he attended he found himself unconsciously chewing the host.
One does not masticate the body of Christ, unless one is starving.
Orsini led him through the corridors to a room John had not seen before. The smell of the dead no longer registered; the sight of corpses no longer returned as nightmares when John slept. This room, however, was heavily barricaded, with a heavy steel door that was barred at the top, center, and bottom.
Inside the room, John knew, there would be a pair of brawny Italians for him to spar with, or a monk with a whip. He was permitted to defend himself, and he did, but over the last weeks he had lost more bouts than he had won. If it was not another fight, then there would be some impossible task to be done. John had hunted and killed the rats that lived by the thousands in the catacombs, shifted stone blocks from one side of a tomb to the other, cleaned and rewrapped the bones of martyrs with holy water and fresh linens, and hauled away a hundred pails of standing, stagnant groundwater.
He didn't know what was behind this door, but he was exhausted. He should have nodded when the novitiate master had asked him if he'd wanted to quit.
Orsini halted at the door and turned to him. "This is your final trial, Brother Keller."
John could have gone to his knees and wept. The novitiate master had promised him that after the final trial his training would be complete. Instead, he nodded carefully.
"In this room is what all Brethren must face: evil. One of the maledicti who stand between us and salvation. You will believe it is a man. It looks like us and talks like us. You may talk to it, reason with it, or surrender to it." Orsini held out a familiar crucifix, one that all the Brethren wore. The cross and the chain it was suspended from were fashioned out of pure copper. "Or you may banish it and its evil from this earth, never to feed off the living, never to pollute God's children with its foul intentions. The choice is yours."
John took the crucifix in his hand, and thought about hanging it around his throat. Remembering the brass knuckles sported by leg breakers back in Chicago, he carefully wound the chain around his fingers.
Orsini removed the bars from the door, and opened it. "God go with you, Brother."
John stepped inside and swept his gaze around the room. He found himself murmuring a paternoster, not out of habit, but out of fear. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…"
It was empty except for a naked man sitting in one corner. The man rose to his feet and said something in a low, strained voice.
Spanish, John thought. He's speaking Spanish, not Italian.
Now that John faced his final adversary, he didn't know if he could go through with what he was charged to do. The Brethren believed this man to be a vampire, and had gone to great lengths to convince John that such creatures existed.
But this was just a man. A naked man, with dried blood on his body and a beseeching look in his eyes.
"¿Qué quieres usted?" the prisoner repeated.
"Do you speak English?" John asked. It had been so long since he had spoken out loud that the words came out hoarse and dry.
"Yes." He looked down. "You are bleeding, amigo."
Walking tore the scabs off; it was why his feet had never healed. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. John looked down at the blood on the floor, and back up at the prisoner, who was licking his dry lips. "You want my blood?" On earth as it is in heaven.
Incredibly, he nodded. "It is how I live."
Give us this day our daily bread. John gripped the crucifix so hard the edges cut into his skin. "You believe that you're a vampire?"
The prisoner's dark brown eyes turned sad. "These men have not lied to you. I am Darkyn."
And forgive us our trespasses. "You're as crazy as they are." John took a step toward the door and then hesitated. The odor of the dead had disappeared, and something else filled the air. Something soft and subtle and enticing.
"Don't leave me here alone, amigo," the man said, very tentatively. "We can help each other."
As we forgive those who trespass against us. John slowly turned back to look at the prisoner. He was moving toward him, his hands out in supplication.